18 tasks, each one witnessed by the sources that watched the job — and behind every one, a prompt you can use tonight.
You spend hours in two modes: digging through sources and organizing what you find. Mornings often mean reading primary materials — letters, reports, or archives — and taking notes in Microsoft Excel or Access to track dates, people, and citations.
Afternoons can be cataloging items in SharePoint, prepping a PowerPoint for a conference, or writing part of a research paper. You also meet colleagues to decide which topics to pursue and to assign cataloging tasks.
Start with Microsoft Excel and Word (part of Microsoft Office) because you’ll use them every day to record data and to draft articles or reports. Excel is how you make timelines, sort dates, and filter sources.
Next learn SharePoint for storing and sharing collections, and PowerPoint for presentations. If you need statistics, learn IBM SPSS Statistics. Adobe Acrobat is handy for scanning and annotating PDFs; Access helps with more complex databases.
Use AI to summarize long documents or suggest search terms, but never let it replace your source criticism. Always check AI-generated facts against original materials and annotate where you used the tool.
Keep raw sources in SharePoint or your institutional archive so others can verify your work. Treat AI outputs as a starting point, not as a primary source or final citation.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reports there were about 3,450 employed in this occupation with a median annual wage of $76,750. The lowest tenth earned $42,730 and the top tenth $131,810, according to BLS data.
Pay varies by employer (universities, museums, non-profits) and by whether you do grant-funded work or contract research.
A development researcher focuses on active projects: choosing topics, tracing developments in a field, writing papers, and presenting findings. You’ll often manage project databases and coordinate cataloging.
An historian may be more focused on long-form interpretation and teaching, while an archivist concentrates on preserving and organizing materials. In practice you’ll overlap: you’ll use SharePoint and Access like an archivist and write like a historian.
Source criticism — the ability to evaluate reliability and bias in documents — is the most-tested skill. Employers will ask for writing samples, annotated bibliographies, or small research exercises that show how you judge and cite sources.
They also test practical skills: give you a dataset to clean in Excel or ask how you’d organize files in SharePoint or Access. Be ready to show a short presentation in PowerPoint.